First Kisses and Other Scary Memories

***WINNERS! WINNERS!***

Thanks to everyone for joining me for my first Teen Shiver blog post. I had a blast. Now, to announce the three winners of a copy of Awake at Dawn:

Tabetha
JenniferJ
Cyndi Tefft

Congrats!! To claim your prize, send me your snail mail address so I can pass it along to my publisher. My email is CC (at) CCHunterBooks (dot) com. (Just remove the spaces and change the (at) and (dot) to the appropriate symbols.) You can also use the contact form at my website, if that's easier - CC Hunter Books.

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Hi Guys!

C.C. Hunter here. I’m new to Teen Shiver and I want to say thanks to all the Teen-Shiver authors for inviting me to join them. When I started to write this blog, I went blank, completely blank. In my house, my husband and my son would have called this a brain fart. But they’re crude guys, so what else can you expect from them?

However, call it what you want, it happens to a lot with writers. We use all our mental energy on our fiction, creating settings, brainstorming plots and creating characters, which includes hot guys and you know much energy that takes. Then when we have to come up with something snappy, there’s nothing in the brain but mental cobwebs. So, with my brain … cobweb handicap, I decided to answer some frequently asked questions I get by readers. And to add a little zing to the post, I’m offering a contest. (I’m also hosting a pet photo contest over at my own blog, http://cchunterbooks.com/blog/ Pop over to the blog to see the contest rules.)

So about the contest I’m hosting here. All you have to do to enter is post a comment. And what’s the prize? St. Martin’s is giving away three copies of my most recent release, Awake at Dawn.

And now for those three questions.

1. What made you want to write YA?

Well, my story is a little different than some authors. I wasn’t writing or planning on writing YA. One could call it luck, but I think it’s more about synchronicity.

I had finaled in a contest years before I had sold and I’d gotten my book in front of an editor at St. Martin’s Press. She liked my writing, but didn’t buy the book. Later, my agent sent this same editor a proposal for a humorous paranormal romance. The editor loved it, but the senior editor didn’t.

However, the editor who loved my voice kept an eye on my career as I started to publish in the romance genre. Then, when they were looking for writers for their new YA program, she contacted my agent and asked if I would be interested in writing a YA. I almost said no, because I didn’t have a clue if my voice would work in the YA market. When I shared my concerns with this editor, she claimed the reason she’d thought of me for this was because of my voice. She said I was a smarta$$ and teens liked that. Who would have guessed that being a smarta$$ would have gotten me somewhere in life? Especially when my mama told me it wouldn’t. LOL.

2. Where did the idea for the series come from and what is your series really about?

When the editor came to me, she had a two-word pitch. Paranormal camp. But for me, a story doesn’t come alive until I have my characters and the internal issues that my characters will face. I came up with a story about a sixteen-year-old girl struggling to figure out who she is, only to discover that she doesn’t know what she is. Imagine being sixteen and told you weren’t human. Especially when you didn’t even know that non-humans existed.

Kylie thinks she’s being sent to Shadow Falls Camp because she got into a bit of trouble. But nope. She’s there to discover some truths about herself. But before she can do that, she has to see through a lie her parents have told her all her life. The story’s main theme is about an identity crisis. It’s something I think teens and, heck, women of all ages, face as we move from one stage of our lives to the other.

Of course, there are also other threads running through the story, like friendship and romance. Kylie meets some crazy people at the camp, vampires, werewolves, witches, faes and shape-shifters, people she isn’t so sure she can trust. Ahh, but in time she not only learns to trust them, she realizes that for the first time in her life she fits in. The title of the series is Shadow Falls, and Awake at Dawn is the second book in the series and it just released Oct. 11^th. The first book, Born at Midnight was released March 29^th. And the third, Taken at Dusk will follow in April 2012. Right now, we’re planning on completing the series with books four and five.

3. What was your first kiss like? (Can you believe people really ask me this? Can you believe I’m actually going to answer it? I guess I do kiss and tell.)

I was thirteen and spending the night at my grandparents. My uncle, only two years older than me, also had a friend staying the night. My uncle’s friend was so hot and he was an older boy. Probably fourteen. After everyone had gone to bed, I heard someone say my name at the door. He wondered if I wanted to talk. We’d shared a bit of dialogue earlier and a few long, lingering stares.

After I crawled out of bed, and got dressed—No way, was I letting him see me in my Cinderella nightshirt—we sought out a place to chat. My grandparent’s house was big, but it only had one bathroom. We sat on a sofa, in the room connected to the bathroom. It was the only room away from all the bedrooms.

We chatted for a while, then he leaned in, slowly, and his mouth touched mine. I opened my mouth ever so slightly, because that’s what I’d heard I was supposed to do, and that’s when it happened. A hiccup exploded from my lips. Not a cute noise, either. It was loud. There I was, getting my first kiss and I got the nervous hiccups. Thank goodness, he was sweet and said it wasn’t a problem.

After a few minutes of chatting (he did most of the talking, I was too scared to open my mouth for fear of another hiccup slipping out) he leaned in to kiss me again. His mouth drew closer until his lips touched mine. It was magic for about a second. Then another noise exploded in the room. It wasn’t my hiccup this time. It was my granddad clearing his throat. My granddad who was only wearing his underwear.

We just sat there and stared at my half-naked grandfather staring at us. I opened my mouth to say we were just talking, or something else equally unconvincing since he’d just witnessed the beginning of a kiss, but all that came out was another LOUD hiccup. Cute, older boy, shot up from the sofa and ran back to his bed, and I did the same.

Yup, my first-kiss memory could have been a tad better. Thank goodness I managed to snag a few better kisses later on.

So what about you guys. Any kissing stories to tell? What books are you reading now? Come on, share a little. You might win a copy of my book.